Fair Warning: potentially adult content

Funny friends I have, already with the phone calls where I pick up and hear One, two, three... And I'm not really surprised, because my friends are immature freaks only capable of picking out the potentially most embarrassing thing I'll ever admit out of a heartfelt post. Luckily, I like my freakish friends and don't care if they think it's funny. It is now, even though it wasn't then.

So, yes, counting to five. I have no shame in admitting it. I was 22 and had been building that moment in my head for ten years. I honestly did expect that I would rock her world, not leave her asking what the hell just happened? Looking back, I think counting to five might even be stretching it, and that was after my cork popping before we even got our clothes off. The only marginal saving grace in that was being 22, and when you're that young and have been waiting to get laid for eight years and you cream your shorts at the idea that in less than a minute you'll get to see BOOBs!, all you need is a tiny bit of understanding and three to five minutes.

Not to say we didn't have fun on our honeymoon; we did. Anything that happened outside the hotel room we had a blast with. Anything happening inside was a huge blow to my ego, made worse by the fact that I had never considered how horrible sex was going to be for my new wife even if I'd had a clue what I was doing. You'd think that after dating for eight years we'd have been able to talk about it, and that she would have been comfortable enough to sock me on the arm and say 'Hey, this hurts, you moron. Take it easy,” but we weren't.

If we'd had the Internet then I probably would have (stupidly) gone looking for answers there, but what I had were friends who would have laughed their asses off, a brother who'd been nailing anything he could for years and whose answer to everything was drink more, and my father. Hell, he laughed, but not at me. Da laughed at my naivety, and the sheer earnestness with which I approached him. I really thought there was something wrong with me, not that I was just an excitable newby in need of some serious practice.

I took his word for it, and his advice to just keep trying. The world rocking took another five or six months to accomplish, and I'm fairly sure my ex stopped referring to me (behind my back) as her Minute Man by then. And yes, that's five or six months in search of what I was beginning to think of as the mythical female orgasm. Keep in mind we were both raised in fairly strict Catholic homes, hers far more strict than mine. If she knew how to help me, she was too shy to say, and I was too stupid to ask.

Hell, I was too stupid to ask her to try things I was curious about, and I hadn't remotely considered that anything I might want her to do to me she might want me to do to her. Not until my brother made an offhand comment and the thought shot through my head I'm expected to do WHAT? That (use your damned imagination) was not something in the approved Catholic list of sex techniques, because that was not leaving “the act” open to conception, and being the good Catholic boy I was, I was all about leaving it open to conception.

That wasn't even a conversation I could have with my wife. If we weren't talking about my miserable carnal failures we sure as hell weren't going to talk about that. And we didn't, not until we'd been married for a good five or six months and during a (very not serious) argument I spouted off with Blow me and she countered, Okay.

All right, go back and re-read, and I'll wait for the light bulb to go off over your head. Not coincidentally, that's about the time the rocking of her world commenced, and I learned to relax and not make it all about what I could and couldn't do.

So it might have taken me longer than average to learn a little control and not finish before she even got started, but I never forgot how much I initially sucked at sex, especially later on when it wasn't a matter of the blind leading the blind, but the blind being lead by a very happy guide dog. And Char knows I'm writing this; she's laughing her ass off, probably because she never had to suffer through my less-than-a-minute-man phase, or even the woohoo-I-lasted-more-than-two-minutes! phase.

Let's see how much she laughs when it occurs to her that I just told the world that she entered this relationship as the blind one.

But I will say it didn't take her any time at all to rock my world.

Quick learner, that one.